Science Advances
October 4, 2017
Sofie L. Valk, Boris C. Bernhardt, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein et al.
Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morphology, we collected longitudinal magnetic resonance...
Neuropsychologia
August 31, 2017
Haakon Engen, Boris C. Bernhardt, Leon Skottnik et al.
ABSTRACT Our goal was to assess the effects of long‐term mental training in socio‐affective skills on structural brain networks. We studied a group of long‐term meditation practitioners (LTMs) who have focused on cultivating socio‐affective skills using loving‐kindness and compassion meditation for an average of 40k h, comparing these to meditation‐naïve controls. To maximize homogeneity of...
August 11, 2017
Cade McCall, Nikolaus Steinbeis, Matthieu Ricard et al.
1 citation
Fairness violations elicit powerful behavioral and affective responses. Indeed, people are willing to incur costs to sanction unfair behavior. Here we study the possible impact of long-term mental training in socio-affective capacities such as compassion on altruistic punishment and compensatory behavior in economic games. To this end we recruited a group of long-term meditation practitioners...
Journal of Cognitive Enhancement
May 16, 2017
Anne Böckler, Lukas Herrmann, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein et al.
Understanding others' feelings, intentions, and beliefs is a crucial social skill both for our personal lives and for meeting the challenges of a globalized world. Recent evidence suggests that the ability to represent and infer others' mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM) can be enhanced by mental training in healthy adults. The present study investigated the role of training-induced...
Psychophysiology
March 1, 2017
Boris Bornemann, Tania Singer
The ability to accurately perceive signals from the body has been shown to be important for physical and psychological health as well as understanding one's emotions. Despite the importance of this skill, often indexed by heartbeat perception accuracy (HBPa), little is known about its malleability. Here, we investigated whether contemplative mental practice can increase HBPa. In the context of...
JAMA Psychiatry
February 1, 2017
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Loneliness is a risk factor for depression and other illnesses and may be caused and reinforced by maladaptive social cognition. Secularized classical meditation training programs address social cognition, but practice typically occurs alone. Little is known about the effectiveness of contemplative practice performed in dyads. To introduce and assess the effectiveness of contemplative dyadic...
Mindfulness
August 18, 2016
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
154 citations
Despite increasing interest in the effects of mental training practices such as meditation, there is much ambiguity regarding whether and to what extent the various types of mental practice have differential effects on psychological change. To address this gap, we compare the effects of four common meditation practices on measures of state change in affect, mind-wandering, meta-cognition, and...
International Journal of Psychophysiology
July 1, 2015
Anna-Lena Lumma, Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Meditation is often associated with a relaxed state of the body. However, meditation can also be regarded as a type of mental task and training, associated with mental effort and physiological arousal. The cardiovascular effects of meditation may vary depending on the type of meditation, degree of mental effort, and amount of training. In the current study we assessed heart rate (HR),...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
February 19, 2015
Haakon Engen, Tania Singer
170 citations
Emotion regulation research has primarily focused on techniques that attenuate or modulate the impact of emotional stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that this mode regulation can be problematic in the context of regulation of emotion elicited by the suffering of others, resulting in reduced emotional connectedness. Here, we investigated the effects of an alternative emotion regulation technique...
Frontiers in Psychology
January 6, 2015
Boris Bornemann, B. Herbert, W. Mehling et al.
Interoceptive body awareness (IA) is crucial for psychological well-being and plays an important role in many contemplative traditions. However, until recently, standardized self-report measures of IA were scarce, not comprehensive, and the effects of interoceptive training on such measures were largely unknown. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire...